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In other words, karma is like old software that you have written for yourself unconsciously. And, of course, you’re updating it on a daily basis!
For humans, when the stomach is empty, there is only one problem; but when the stomach is full, there are one hundred problems!
It is the level of bitterness and hatred that causes karma, not the act alone.
Ultimately, life is neither suffering nor bliss. It is what you want it to be. Life has no inherent quality whatsoever. The choice is always yours. The volition is always yours.
Living totally does not mean just having a good time. It means experiencing anything that comes your way fully and intensely.
Ignorance is also a karma. As action is karma, inaction is also karma!
There is only one crime against life: to make believe that you are something other than life.
Don’t look for anything. Don’t look for the meaning of life. Don’t look for God. Just look—that’s all.
Enlightenment can happen only to an individual.
When you live by the memory of a single book, you are religious. When you live by the memory of several books, you are intellectual. When you live by the memory of several generations of people, you become a truly compassionate human being. But when you live beyond the memory of generations of people, you become a mystic.
The mind simply interprets what the body perceives. Sharpening the body’s ability to perceive is the whole purpose of yoga.
The goal for every freedom seeker is the same: to attend to your karma now rather than wait for life to throw it at you.
If you washed away all your karma, you would exit your body this very instant!
Doing something miserably or self-righteously is not a contribution to life. When your activity is such suffering, you will create much suffering around you. If you can work joyfully, you should do it twenty-four hours of the day. If you cannot, it is better you stop. The planet is full of miserable people working hard and manufacturing more misery in the process, both for themselves and for everyone else.
a game is won only when you play it well, not because you desire to win.
Repeating a scriptural truth without an inner experience of it is a futile exercise. It will not transform your life in any way.
If you take more karmic load now, when you are well and capable, later you will walk “hands-free”!
Most people’s problem is not a life that is hellish, but a life that is too heavenly! These are the ailments of privilege.
The reason those on the spiritual path have a daily practice is just this: to ensure that karmic stagnation does not happen. You may already have noticed that if you have a daily practice and you stop it for six months, many recurrent issues—physical, psychological, and social—that have not bothered you for a while start returning. This is how the karmic cycle works. You may have believed you were transformed, but you will suddenly find all kinds of compulsive behaviors returning with a vengeance. Only practice, or sadhana, helps break the cyclical movement of life.
Once you have come to this planet as a human being, if you do not experience your universality—the incredible possibility implicit in this moment—your human form has gone to waste. To merely eat, sleep, reproduce, and die, you do not need the sophisticated body, mind, and awareness you have been gifted with. If this tremendous gift is not explored, it is a terrible shame.
there is no such thing as freedom when the very way you think, feel, and perceive life is conditioned by your past experience.
From the day you were born, your parents, your family, your culture, your religion, your education, your social context have worked upon you, determining who you are right now. So your mind is very deeply conditioned by your past. This conditioning is what we call karma.
If there are some young people next door playing heavymetal music, you may go into ecstasy, but your grandfather may have a nervous breakdown! The same sound creates a pleasant sensation in one person and drives the other crazy.
If you have strong likes and dislikes, your suffering is also more intense.
With equanimity, your entire structure of karma begins to collapse. All it takes is a willingness to experience everything the way it is. You are not avoiding experience or pursuing it. You are simply open to enjoying the different flavors of life without seeking one and escaping the other.
The mental body is a wonderful instrument, but it can also rust with age. There are many who find that their memory is not as sharp as when they were younger. The energy body, however, can be completely unaffected by the aging process. You can maintain it just the way it was when you were born and keep it in mint-fresh condition until you die. The impact of a strong energy body on your life and on the world around you is tremendous.
The kriya Shambhavi Mahamudra that I initiate people into during my Inner Engineering programs is significant for this reason. It picks off the karmic material from the energy system and thereby changes your destination. It would be possible to devote the program to turning out pleasant human beings. This would meet with great social approval. But whether you are pleasant or unpleasant has no spiritual relevance. Once you transform the content of the energy body, the fundamentals of life will begin to alter. You are now hugely empowered to begin your march toward freedom.
If you cultivated the spiritual life, you would have another option, too. Once your software starts diminishing, you would have the freedom and balance to know when to shed your hardware. In other words, you would know when and how to walk out of the physical body. You would exit before you are evacuated.
Instead of sitting on the beach, you choose to become the ocean.
If you look back on dozens of lives, you will have no urge to go through the same nonsense again and again. Once you know that the mortal way is just a repetition, you will seek another way—the eternal way. No one really wants to keep repeating the same rigmarole time and again. Few are that foolish; most people are just forgetful.
Even now, your personality is a projection of many past lives. But this is an unconscious projection. If this becomes a conscious projection, you will see that the anger or jealousy you are experiencing right now will be transformed into love and compassion.
your karma makes you settle down in a particular womb. In other words, you choose an environment with which you may share tendencies or attributes.
But those who long to leave a footprint shall never fly.
Inner Engineering can be thought of as a synthesis of holistic sciences to help participants establish an inner foundation and vision for all dimensions of life and find the necessary balance between the challenges of a hectic career and the inner longing for peace and wellbeing.
